1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved joy stick device, and more specifically, to a multi-axial joy stick device which employs an increased number of operational axes to facilitate a sophisticated control operation for an object having many operational axes, such as a manipulator.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional joy stick device comprises an operational stick supported by a ball bearing or the like so that the stick can be pivoted or rotated. The components of the rotation, or displacement, of the stick are taken along two rectangular coordinate axes. Each of the components of a displacement are detected as an amount of rotation about the corresponding axis by a potentiometer or the like. The detection signals are proportionally outputted to a controlled device. Thus, the controlled device is moved in a plane in a desired direction by operating the joy stick.
In most of the conventional joy stick devices, since a movement of the operational stick is detected as the amount of rotation about each of the two rectangular coordinate axes, the movements of a controlled device can be controlled only in a plane. Therefore, to control the controlled device in three dimensional space, a plane of the movement is shifted frequently by, for example, operating a switch. Such a technique has problems in that the switching operation to shift the plane becomes troublesome, and because the directions of the stick operation do not correspond to the directions of the controlled device's movement, operability is substantially lowered. These problems are significant particularly when a conventional joy stick is used to manually control a multi-axial machine such as a manipulator.